Sustainability has been a topic of focus in our industry for some time now. It's at the forefront of the way Lonza runs its business. Their Vision Zero initiative seeks to reduce emissions, water consumption and waste, and work incidents. Notably, Lonza has already made significant improvements along with reductions in incidents, and have now begun to look at their supply chain to meet more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets. I'm Miles Szkoda. This is the Life Science Connect Webinar Series. Today, we're talking environmental sustainability at Lonza Small Molecules with a focus on wastewater incineration reduction. Joining me for this presentation to talk more about this program from Lonza are Dr. Niklaus Künzle, Senior Director and Head of Global Process Technology and Innovation for Small Molecules, and Dr.
Andreas Sieber, Associate Director for the Solid Technologies Process Technology and Innovation Group, who are going to describe how Lonza is working to reduce the environmental impact of small molecule production by combining state-of-the-art production facilities, resource-saving processes, solvent recycling, and low energy waste treatment. We'll be holding a Q&A session following this presentation, and please feel free to submit questions as we go along. We'll get to as many questions as possible during the Q&A, and any that we don't get to, we'll follow up on after the event. Now just a bit of housekeeping.
If you run into any issues today, please try refreshing your browser first. If your problem persists, submit a question via the Q&A, and I'll help get you back on track. Finally, the webinar will be available on demand, normally within a couple of days, and you'll get an email with a link to it. With all that said, I'm gonna turn it over to Niklaus to get started.
Thank you very much, Miles. Also a very warm welcome from my side. I will guide you through the first part, which is about environmental sustainability, the general approach within Lonza Small Molecules. Before I hand over then to Andreas Sieber, who'll show you a bit more in detail into wastewater incineration reduction. For those who are not so familiar with Lonza is a leading contract development and manufacturing organization in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and nutrition markets. Our purpose is to enable a healthier world. That means we are not only doing that by bringing therapies to life, but also by keeping our sustainability footprint as good as possible. You see here our sustainability journey. We have in our strategic priorities, we have sustainability here in the center of our priorities.
You can also see in our values and policy that sustainability is very well embedded. These are all these values are somehow connected also with sustainability and also in our policy. You can see Vision Zero, environment, compliance, and integrity is important for us. We are aligned to the United Nations, SDGs, so the Sustainable Development Goals. Out from this bunch of 17 different SDG goals from the UN, we have selected 7 SDGs, which have a certain relevance to our daily business. The top 3, good health and wellbeing, of course, is essential for us. This is our purpose to deliver therapies together with our customers. Also we have quality education, where we want to improve the education and the development of our people.
Also gender equality is one of our sustainability goals. We want to bring up the amount or the ratio of women in several functions. Today we focus on the four SDGs, which are below of the slide. One is the clean water and sanitation. One is the industry, innovation, and infrastructure. Here we focus a bit more about our buildings, our infrastructure. We have a responsible consumption and production. Here we look mainly at raw materials, supply chains, and the climate action 13, which then focus on global warming gases or greenhouse gases and wastes and energy. We have embedded our ESG targets. Our ESG targets are also embedded in the employee.
In employee rewards. That means that our incentives are connected with these targets. Let's come to a bit more into detail about the KPIs. We have defined 4 different KPIs, which are connected to these targets. Energy is one of these, and we have the ambition till 2025 that we reduce or till 2030 that we reduce our energy impact by 36%. That means the intensity, because we are a company which grows every year quite a lot at the moment, therefore, we connected this intensity of energy to the sales numbers. Number 2 is greenhouse gases. We want to reduce that by the same value, by 36%. We also have the waste reduction of 24% and industrial water by 50%.
That's now the KPIs, but the question now is how can we change that? How we can improve that values? Here as well, we have four different topics, which we look at a bit more in detail. What we can do, of course, is to keep our facilities, our equipment and utilities on state-of-the-art level. That means that we analyze our existing buildings in terms, for example, on heat insulation, efficient HVAC operation, heat recovery. We also have the goal to be in our electricity sustainable till 25, so no more nuclear power or coal-based energy. We focus here also on the circular utility economy. The second pillar of our activities is production processes and changeover.
Everything we do in our projects, in our processes has a direct impact on waste, on the use of raw material. When we can improve our production processes, this directly reduces waste. All material which we don't use does not have to produce beforehand. This one is really a very important part of the whole sustainability strategy. If we can't eliminate materials and we end up with waste, of course, we have to look at how can we treat this waste and best of it, if we have waste that we recycle it back somewhere in our own processes or into another process or sell the material as a raw material in another industry.
Number 4 of our activities is culture and behavior. That means we want to strengthen and encourage the behavior of our employees in their sustainable behavior. We support that by activities which we have on site, for example, a green team, which brings in ideas and can do self-driven initiatives on the sustainable behavior. Also we promote activities in the private life, we give them the possibilities to use e-bikes, not to use their cars to go to work and back home. Good. The next slide here, I have to explain a bit. On the X-axis, you can see this PMI.
This is the Process Mass Intensity defined by the kilogram of materials by the kilogram of product. That means if we produce 1 kilogram of our products, we have, for example, 100 kilograms of raw materials like building blocks or solvents. Our PMI is 100 when we have this ratio. We have seen that this PMI directly correlates with our energy usage and also with our greenhouse gas production, and also with our waste production, of course. When we have 100 kilograms raw materials per kilogram product, it's clear that we produce 99 kilograms of waste, and this directly has the influence to the CO₂.
Energy is more linked into the dilution of a process and the effort to clean up the material from a very diluted solution, for example. This is here on the X-axis, you can see this PMI. On the Y-axis, we have more or less the same but with water, the process water intensity. You can see here the definition, it's exactly the same as above with the process mass intensity. The kilograms of water in comparison to the kilogram of product. You now see here all these bubbles in the chart. Each of these bubble represents one process which we run in our small molecule facilities. It's not complete, but some of the most important processes are reflected here.
The size of the bubble reflects the amount, so the kilograms of material we produce per campaign. You can see also here the colors A until G, and it's similar to the sticker you have at home on your fridge, which shows a bit what is the sustainability impact of each process. A process in the G area is not so sustainable, and a process in the A area is much more sustainable. Our aim here is to push all this on the red edge of the chart to push them down into the green area.
Therefore, we have for all of the processes between E and G, we have at least one project running which focuses into the reduction of this PMI and PWI. You see here one of one example. We started here in the F area of this process around one year ago, we implemented that. Just by doing a process improvement or several process improvements, solvent changes and also the kinetics, we could improve the process here from F to E. You can see here it's a logarithmic table, so it's more than a double sustainability improvement, what we could achieve here. That's our guidance when we look at the processes.
When we come back to this slide here, we go now a bit more into the area of waste treatment and rework and recycling of solvents. This is more the end-of-pipe view. When we are not able to change something in the process, we also look at this at these topics. With that, I introduce a bit. We started two large projects in Small Molecules. One is about the wastewater incineration reduction, which will be the topic then afterwards with Andreas. The second one is solvent recovery. The goal of this is we just don't want to incinerate so much material anymore. Can be water. In the real project are solvents and the solvents we want to recycle.
We don't have then to produce the raw material, or get produced for us. We also don't have to incinerate this material. Therefore, we see this reduction of CO₂ when we can do that. One positive side product is also that we have simplified logistics. We are not dependent into an incineration and the whole infrastructure which is necessary with that. We could see that we also have a reduced production downtime for these projects. Where are we at the moment? With these two projects, I said, typically a process starts with fresh solvents. We have an API production, we end up with solvent waste and aqueous waste. From all the waste we had in two, three years ago, we could recycle a certain amount.
We don't have to go to the incineration anymore. In the case of the solvents, we could already achieve 30% of the solvent, which we could then work up and either reuse the solvent in other processes or sell it to different markets, or recycle this material in the same API manufacturing process. For that, we already could achieve 25%. That means we are now at 30%, but we have, of course, more to go. Our aim is, our vision is to achieve here at least 70% recycling rate for the solvent recovery.
When we look at the aqueous waste, which we will go much more into detail afterwards with Andreas, we could here as well achieve that we could reduce the incineration by 30% and instead of incinerate that, treat them differently. The whole improvements, what we could already achieve here, you can compare it with 54,000 economy flights from London to New York. It's a huge amount of greenhouse gases we could eliminate. Good. Now for the next part, with this aqueous waste, I will hand over to Andreas. He will go a bit more in detail how we did that and what we did in this, in this topic.
Thank you very much, Niklaus, also a warm welcome from my side. What are the challenges in the wastewater incineration reduction project? We have low limits for API, for refractory TOC, for solvents and for micropollutants in general, for disposal into the wastewater treatment plant. It is easy to understand why, if we are looking at our region. We are in a touristic region, in agriculture region, and we are situated in the middle of a mountain valley at the Rhone River, which goes to Lake Geneva. Lake Geneva, it's basically the largest drinking water reserves in Western Europe. It is very important that we have almost no impact on this ecosystem, and therefore, the very strict limits for disposal of the wastewater.
To reach our goal and to reduce the amount of incinerated wastewater, very efficient pretreatment processes are required. Very often, a complex combination of organic, light and heavy boilers have to be removed prior to the disposal of the waste to the wastewater treatment plant. For us, of course, a good treatment process goes far below the actual limits in order to really have the lowest possible impact. In addition, a good process would also be an on-site process because this will simplify the logistics and also reduces the footprint because no transportation is required. Our waste often contains solvents, APIs, other environmental and also human toxic organic compounds and salts. What is our approach to solve these challenges? We have established the following workflow. It starts with a detailed waste stream analysis.
Here it is very important that this is done on the level of each possible substream. This basically lays the basis for a technology evaluation on paper. Different technologies are evaluated either for the substreams or for a mixtures of all waste streams together for a given process. The next step is to prove the feasibility with lab experiments, and basically based on that, a business case is established. This is the last milestone prior then to development and implementation of the process. The business case, of course, also includes an energy and the CO₂ balance so that we can really also assess the environmental benefit. With some technologies, we even get enough information from the lab feasibility phase, and then we don't have to develop anymore, and we can directly implement the technology.
Very important, in this project is the broad interdisciplinary collaboration between internal and external partners. Internal partners which are involved in these projects are production, of course. It's Manufacturing Science and Technology, Process Technology and Innovation Group, environmental, health and safety group, and also the waste management. With the technology portfolio we have, we are not covering all technologies by ourselves, and that's the reason why we also have a broad collaboration with many different external partners to further bring new technologies on site. What are the technologies we have and we are looking at? We have in-house technologies shown here. It starts with a stripping distillation. We have extraction. It's basically a liquid-liquid extraction. We have thermal hydrolysis, where the molecules are decomposed under high pressure, high temperature and very basic conditions.
We have absorption technologies, which is typically activated carbon or ion-exchange resins. Some simple other units operation like mechanical solid liquid separation, liquid-liquid separation, neutralization, precipitation, for example. It can be also a simple chemical treatment and nanofiltration. The advantage of the in-house technologies are that we have a low CapEx or almost no CapEx. The knowledge is on-site, so this basically then enables us for a fast evaluation and also implementation. Of course, we cannot solve all the challenges, as you will see later, with the in-house technologies, and therefore we have external collaborations shown here. We can group them basically into three groups. One is the AOP technologies like photooxidation, electro-oxidation, ozonation or supercritical water oxidation. Other novel membrane technologies and also enzymatic decompositions.
These technologies are complementary to our in-house technologies, and so far, we have not yet implemented them. As you will see later, here we are in the development phase. It is also important to mention with regard to the new technologies that we have multipurpose plants. We are running campaign-wise, and a typical campaign runs from weeks to a few months, and then after a short changeover time, a new product is produced. Therefore, these new technologies should have as broad flexibility as possible, which is then of course a big advantage because our waste streams from one product to the other products are quite changing a lot. How do we select the most promising project?
This is done in close collaboration with Manufacturing Science and Technology and also with plant operation. It's mainly based on our waste database. From the waste database, we have a forecast of the amount of wastewater over several years, and we also get rough information about the composition of the waste. Based on the information of the composition of the waste, we then do a first assessment of the feasibility. It's basically done with this score here. If it's possible, if we think the separation task is possible with existing equipment and technology, if it's a simple separation task, then we get a score of about 70%-90%. If it's a more difficult task, more investigation is required and also development work, then we give a score of about 40%-60%.
If we think it's a quite complex separation task or maybe also new technologies are required or a higher CapEx, then we give a score of about 10%-30%. Based on that score, on this assessment, we then calculate the so-called reduction potential, which is basically the product of the stream size times the assessment. Candidates with then the highest reduction potential are finally selected for our project. Just as an example, product A, we have a waste stream of about 1,600 tons a year, and the separation task was assessed to be a simple separation task. We have to remove MTBE and also API from that waste stream prior to the disposal to the wastewater treatment plant.
We gave a score of 90, then the product is about 1,500 tons. You will see later in the example, in the third example we are going to present that we have successfully implemented that project. In the next few slides, I would like to give some examples of projects. The first project, it's basically a complex mixture of 13 waste streams which were incinerated. Roughly 33 kg per kg of product, wastewater was produced. The detailed analysis has shown that only 3 waste streams are really problematic. Different treatment technologies for the problematic streams were tested as well. However, their pre-treatment is very challenging and therefore, we have implemented the following intermediate solution. It's shown down here. Basically, we are separating the 3 problematic waste stream, and we are still incinerating these waste streams.
It's about 6 kg per kg of product. The other waste streams which do not contain any problematic compounds and which have a very high biodegradability, are then finally treated in the wastewater treatment plant. Just separating waste stream, that sounds quite simple, but it wasn't that straightforward to implement in reality. You have to imagine that additional tanks are required, new piping with also safety measures and also adaption of the recipes were required to establish this process. The safety measures we have established are in principle online conductivity measurements to ensure that the aqua streams are well separated. In addition to these precautions, not only for this project but for all of the projects I'm going to present, we are always analyzing the pre-treated wastewater prior to discharging to the wastewater treatment plant.
With this, we basically ensure that we always comply with the limits. As I said, we are still working on alternative solutions for the three remaining streams. Currently, we are testing thermal hydrolysis stripping and also stripping activated carbon treatments. An important point is if we are looking at these numbers, this project nicely demonstrates that the stepwise approach where partial solution is fast implemented is very valuable. Even with that solution, which is not complete, we are reducing the incinerated wastewater by about 80% to about 2,200 tons a year are less incinerated, and this gives a substantial CO₂ reduction of about 500 tons a year.
The next project in this example, waste stream containing methanol and salt is worked up in our central solvent recovery plant to remove the light boilers. The recovered methanol is even used for steam generation, so its energy is recovered and the sump is then finally treated in the wastewater treatment plant. With these measures, the incineration of wastewater for this product was virtually reduced to zero. About 1,600 tons of wastewater are less incinerated per year, and this leads to a CO₂ reduction of about 300 tons.
As also mentioned by Niklaus, in this project, the waste logistic was also crucial because the pre-treatment is done at the different locations than the production site is, therefore, the logistic was further simplified by installing a pipe between the production site and our central solvent recovery plant. This is the third project. I have already mentioned it in the evaluation phase of the project. Basically, in this project, we have a waste stream containing 1% of MTBE and traces of an API which is worked up. Initially, 23 kg waste per kg product were incinerated. Several solutions were evaluated for that project found to be feasible. The final implemented solution is shown down here. It is a two-stage process. In the first step, the MTBE is distilled off and the distillate is incinerated.
In the second step, the API is removed with activated carbon in a continuous process. The activated carbon is finally reactivated, which also further reduces the footprint. The distillate stream of 2 kg per kg of product is much higher than what you would expect based on the MTBE concentration. It's about 10 times higher. The reason for stripping off additional wastewater are the very low limits for MTBE in our wastewater treatment plant. With that, we are basically ensuring always to be much below these limits. With that solution, the amount of incinerated wastewater is reduced by about 90%, which roughly corresponds to 550 tons of wastewater less incinerated per year, or a saving of about 90 tons of CO₂ per year. As I said, alternative solutions are feasible as well.
One of them is photooxidation using hydrogen peroxide, which will decompose the MTBE and the API far below the limits, basically then reducing the amount of incinerated wastewater to virtually zero. However, this solution was finally not implemented due to the longer lead time and also the CapEx compared to the solution we have chosen, because the chosen solution was basically realized in the actual production plant with existing equipment. Another solution we have evaluated is basically a combination of distillation and decomposition of the API by an enzyme. The advantage here would be that no activated carbon is consumed anymore. However, the disadvantage is that the enzymatic decomposition basically splits the API into smaller subunits, but they will stay in the wastewater and still might have some activity.
In that special case, it was not that easy to assess the activity of these compounds. Finally, we have decided to be on the safe side, and that's then the reason why a combination of distillation and activated carbon treatment was chosen, which works very well, and we are very far below the limits. The last example is an example which is not yet implemented. It will be implemented when the next production campaign starts. Here we have six waste streams which are generated during this production, and one waste stream was found to be very resistant against the pretreatment. The reason for this is that we have a very high TOC in that waste stream, and also high amount of dissolved solids.
However, for the remaining waste streams, a good pretreatment process was found basically by distilling off the light boilers at the high pH. The high pH here is really key, and caustic soda is added in the process because under these conditions, the heavy boilers are partially converted to more volatile products and then are also stripped off. The remaining compound in the sump shows then a high biodegradability and finally is then treated in our waste treatment plant. In the current solution, which is down here, shown here, we are separating waste stream six and the distillate stream, which is then incinerated, and the remaining streams are given to the wastewater treatment plant after the distillation at very high pH.
With this solution, we are reducing the amount of incinerated wastewater by about 900 tons a year and which corresponds to roughly 50 tons of CO2, which is less produced per year. As I said, several different technologies were evaluated here as well, and we are still evaluating some technologies for the remaining stream. However, it really seems to be challenging due to the high TOC content and also the high amount of dissolved solids. This brings me to the summary of the examples I have just shown. These 4 projects are reducing the CO2 emission by about 900 tons of CO2 per year and about 5,000 tons of wastewater are less incinerated per year.
This is a reduction of about 30% of the wastewater for the Visp site, which is really a substantial reduction. Of course, the ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of incinerated wastewater to virtually 0. This brings me basically to the outlook. We have different possibilities at the Visp site for disposing the wastewater. Very efficient, of course, is the wastewater treatment plant if the waste does not contain any problematic compounds and all the limits are fulfilled. If the limits are not fulfilled, we have different options. One option is the on-site incineration of the waste or external disposal. External disposal can include incineration as well, but it's not limited to that.
Of course, as I just have shown, we have the option to remove the problematic compounds via pretreatment process and then giving it to the wastewater plant. Incineration, it's a very efficient way for disposal of wastewater which have a very high TOC, a very high chemical oxygen demand. As shown before in many other cases, the pretreatment is the better option. Here we have a gap. We have many technologies already available on-site, but as shown before, some streams could not be treated efficiently. The question would be how to bridge this gap most efficiently. Currently, we are evaluating different technologies, and we think that an AOP technology like, for example, supercritical water oxidation, wet air oxidation, photooxidation or electro-oxidation might be the right choice to complement our portfolio.
Important for us will be that the technology is flexible since we are running multipurpose plants which will always lead to a strong variation in the, in the waste composition from one product to the other. Some of the evaluated technologies even discharges virtually pure water, and one can even consider the reuse of this water. The final goal will be to avoid incineration and to have very efficient and sustainable on-site wastewater treatment processes in place. Our basic workflow shown here is a very efficient tool to reach that goal. Thank you very much for your attention.
All right. Andreas and Nicholas, thank you so much. This was fascinating and a great look into everything you guys are doing for the environment and sustainability. Let's see. I have a great list of questions. For our audience, I am highlighting the Ask a Question box on your screen right now. You should see it glowing, so you can ask us questions as we kinda get into this. Let's get started. Someone is asking, "How long did it take you to reduce the 30% of solvents through recycling?" Along those lines, we actually have an additional person joining us for the Q&A. We do have Brian Schwegler. I believe Brian is a chemical engineer with Lonza. For that question, again, they're asking, "How long did it take you to reduce the 30% of solvents through recycling?
I will hand over this question to Brian. These two projects, wastewater incineration is quite a recent process project, but solvent recovery project has a certain history, and we always did that in the last many years already. I hand over to Brian for this question. He's responsible for that area.
Good. Thank you for the question. My name is Brian Schwegler. I've been a chemical engineer at Lonza for about 20 years now, and I'm currently heading the Thermal & Membrane Separations with a focus on solvent recovery. Interestingly enough, it's been a good, let's say, 10-15 years that we've been considering solvent recycling and actually recycling solvents into our processes. This is not something new. The approach is similar to what Andreas has described for the wastewater treatment as an interdisciplinary approach to solvent recovery. From a sustainability aspect, the CO₂ savings are huge because you have the Scope 1 and the Scope 3. You're reducing raw materials and also reducing a lot of CO₂ coming out of the smokestack from the solvents itself.
Within the last, let's say, 10 years, we've really accelerated with solvent recovery. To get to the 30%, I'd say within the last 5 years, we've been up to at least 30%. As a custom manufacturer, we have quite some fluctuation in the product portfolio. We've had a lot of products where we've implemented solvent recovery, which have been, let's say, faded off, and new products have come into the portfolio where we have new challenges, as far as implementing solvent recycling. Solvent recovery, as Nicolas had said, can be into recycling or reuse, where the barriers of entry for reuse of solvent are a lot lower than recycling into a pharmaceutical API, where the criteria are much more stringent and the investigations as far as recycling into an API are a lot higher. This requires more time to get back into the process.
Okay. Awesome.
Thank you.
Thanks, Brian. Thanks for joining us. Glad to have you here, and we're definitely glad we had you hop on and get an answer here. Let's see. Nicolas, I think this one is for you. It was asked early on during your presentation, someone asked, "Is the PMI access on the PMI PWI graph linear or logarithmic?
Yeah. I can show again this slide. You can see on both axis, PMI as well as PWI is logarithmic. You have a very broad span in the sustainability of the different processes.
Great. That's perfect. Okay, moving on to our next question. We've got a ton rolling in here. Someone's asking, "Is the treated wastewater discharged to a kind of surface water from the wastewater treatment plant?
Thank you for the question. It's discharged to the industrial wastewater because if you would charge it to the surface water, it might go to an overflow, and we don't want that this happens. We ensure always that it's then properly treated in the wastewater treatment plant.
Awesome. Thank you very much for that.
Maybe I have to say that we have a wastewater treatment plant, which is a shared plant between industrial wastewater and municipal wastewater, and also surface wastewater. They are separated.
That's great. That helps. Yeah. Let's see. I've got another one here. Someone's asking, "As you reduce your incineration, what do you do to replace the energy heat that you would have captured through the incineration process?
Yeah, I can take this one. Of course, you always have to this always have to be hand in hand also with energy reduction. You're right, when you just use all your energy for the energy product-- all your incineration for energy production, you don't win a lot when you just have to replace all this incinerated material by, for example, natural gas or other fuels. You also have to reduce your energy usage. Well, of course, you reduce the production energy which you use. The Scope 3 greenhouse gas for the production of the solvent, for example. You should also eliminate then the energy consumption. Should go hand in hand.
Okay, that's awesome. Thanks, Nicolas. I think that makes sense. Let's see. I'm gonna push down to some that came in a little earlier. We do have some coming in later as well. There's a lot of questions. Someone's asking, "What is the approach to push the processes to the green end? Like low PMI, low PWI.
Yeah. As mentioned in the beginning, the process should have first priority. Every solvent which you can eliminate or every overstep geometric or raw material which you remove has not to be treated as waste. Sometimes this is difficult when processes have to be revalidated or customers are not interested in process changes. Second priority has our end-of-pipe solutions, to recycle or reuse waste or at least choose low energy treatment solutions. We can also think about renewable raw materials. For example, solvents or raw materials from renewable sources. This is at the moment, only possible for a very limited number of materials. We would love to do this, but it's not much available. I hope this will change in the future. Also we have to ensure that our installations are state-of-the-art.
We have the lowest energy and water consumption as possible. What also comes into my mind is that we reduce waste from mistakes. Out of specification batches, things like that always generate a lot of material and a lot of energy wasted. Therefore, we also have programs to minimize our material, which is not in spec and cannot be sold. so we call this planning for quality control and reliability.
Niklaus, that's awesome. Thank you. Let's see. Here's another one. Someone's asking if several technologies are feasible, what are the key criteria for your final choice? How do you select the ideal technology?
Thank you. Question. That's really a good question. I think there is...
Yeah, Andreas, I think you are muted.
Yeah, you're right. Sorry for that. Thanks for the question. That's really good question, I think there is no universal answer. It's really a case-by-case decision, which is basically made as in a decision analysis. I think the more sustainable the process is, the more benefit it will be on long term. If we think for energy pricing crisis, for example, and also our customer ask for sustainable production. That's an also an advantage for us to get projects. That's shown, I think also fast implementation is important. I think also a risk assessment is required. A low-risk solution with the lowest possible impact on the environment as it would be a preferred solution as we have shown in the CERT example where then have finally chosen the activated carbon treatment.
Great. Thanks, Andreas. Let's see. Up next here, this looks like a good one. Someone's asking, if you could talk about how nanofiltration is involved or helps your water projects.
Basically, the nanofiltration is used if we have to remove larger molecule weight molecules. We do the nanofiltration, and then the remaining is then treated in incineration.
All right. That's perfect. let's see. Another question here, someone's asking, do you have a dedicated sustainability workforce, to reduce LANXESS's environmental footprint?
My answer is twofold to that one. Yes, we have a dedicated or we have dedicated resources for the improvement of the footprints on various levels. One is on corporate and site-specific. We have sustainability teams. Each division also has formed a structure and strategy to enhance sustainability. Number three is we also have project teams which work on technologies to have a look at the bigger pictures and also on midterm programs, technologies to improve also the processes. I think what is also very important in terms of improvement is the acceleration of sustainability in non-dedicated teams.
In my eyes, sustainability should not also be only the topic of a specific team, but every team like R&D, MSAT, operations, and engineering should be focusing on sustainability. That's what we try with our promoting culture and the attitude of the people in all the areas so that they can do, whatever they do, they can have a focus always in their mind, "I should have a look on sustainability." I think this is at least as important as the dedicated teams which then focus on sustainability.
That's perfect. Thanks, Niklaus. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. You know, you've got the teams focused, but it really needs to be an overall kind of focus of everyone. You know, your part of your job as you're doing your work, take an idea of sustainability and apply that to whatever you're doing, you know, and really make considerations for it. That's awesome. I've got a follow-up for you, Niklaus. Someone else is asking, could you talk about what your main driver to reduce your overall footprint is, and do you plan any additional initiatives for the future?
As the name says, it's sustainability. We want to be able to do business also tomorrow. For that, we will need also tomorrow resources and a healthy environment. I would say that's our main driver. I'm convinced that also in the future, only processes which have the best environmental footprint will have a chance to be the processes of tomorrow. For the second quest. Additional initiatives, yes, we have additional initiatives. For example, the solvent recovery, as I mentioned, we want to reach 70%, that's not only a vision. That's really a project we are aiming at. We have a project team working on this to make this happen.
We have several technology developments in the waste treatment or so green chemistry technology area. We want to develop or bring into company new technologies which help us in this area. We have a raw material and sourcing initiative ongoing. We have infrastructure assessments which analyze our existing infrastructure for improvement potentials, and we work on this improvement as well. We also want to have a much more strong networking approach within the company, so with the different sites, but also among other companies. What we do today is one part. We want to give others the opportunity to learn from us, and we hope that we also get feedback from other companies, how they do that. I think this initiative should be promoted much more.
Okay, that's great. Thanks, Niklaus. Let's see. I've got another one here. They said 2-part question. First part is treated water sent to storm or sanitary sewer? 2, what criteria for treated water are you achieving, COD, BOD, TDS, et cetera?
Thanks for the question. Again, first one, it goes to the sanitary sewer, so that we ensure that it's always treated with the wastewater treatment plant. The second part about the criterias we have to achieve, this is really assessed on a basis for each individual project. Basically, this is also done by a dedicated team within EHS, who is then setting the limits. They are considering several parts. One is that the degradability is measured. So in principle, we only want to have degradable substances in our wastewater treatment plant.
It's also tested, experimentally tested, the PNEC for the wastewater treatment plant so that we can avoid inhibition of the bacterias in the plant. Then also, based on PNEC, an ecotoxicological assessment is done. Based basically on the tolerable drinking water standard, they are also doing a human toxicological assessment. Then for each individual component we have in the wastewater which is problematic, we are then setting or getting a limit we have to fulfill.
Gotcha. Thanks, Andreas. Andreas, just sticking with you real quick. I mean, you've talked about a lot of initiatives and things that you've taken on over the, over the years. Could you talk about what are the main challenges that you've kind of been facing in these initiatives?
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, we have technical challenges, of course, but also organizational challenges, I would say. Organizational challenges is that many different people, also from different teams and departments, are involved, and also external partners, as you have seen during the presentation. They are also involved at different stages. Here we basically made good experience that we involve all the people at an early stage to get their feedback, to get their ideas, to find together the best solution. I think regular updates, discussions, and meetings with all involved persons is very important there. Yeah. The technical challenges I already mentioned a little bit. It's basically the complex mixture with high organic loads and also with high total dissolved solids.
Some of them we have not yet solved, as shown in the examples. Here we can really strongly rely on our SMEs and also on the partners. I'm confident that also for the remaining streams, we will find a good solution. Yeah, maybe last but not least, what's also very important to solve these challenges is that we get a really strong support from our management. This support is really appreciated from the team, and it also makes it much easier to find good solutions.
Awesome. That's great, Andreas. Thank you. This is just really. This is super interesting stuff and definitely a great achievement. Let's see. Someone's asking, what kind of spectroscopic non-destructive PAT tools do you use in order to maximize production with minimal wastewater consumption? Are you only monitoring or also controlling your production? If so, what kind of parameters are the most important?
Very good question. This is really something we do quite a lot. We have a dedicated PAT team. We are on one hand looking at on processes to monitor, for example, the reaction, and the optimal level to stop a reaction. We also look at cleaning. In the area of cleaning, we also have a project to be able to control the cleaning not only by the mass of solvent or the time, how long we clean, but also about the efficiency of the cleaning, for example. Both of that, very valuable things. PAT, I mean, PAT is defined as one of the green chemistry principles, and we really rely on this technology and use this technology more and more for the control of our reactions and cleaning, and also for the work-up, of course.
That's great. Niklaus, thank you. I think with that, we've got a few questions left that are a bit specific, so we're gonna hold those off. If you did ask a question and we didn't get to it now, we are gonna follow up after the event. Don't worry, we will get answers to your questions. With that, again, I wanted to extend a thank you to Niklaus, to Andreas, and to Brian as well for joining us, talking about this great sustainability initiative and all this amazing stuff that you guys are doing. I mean, it's critical to our industry, but it's also critical to our world. We really appreciate everything that you've come and talked about today. To our audience members, thank you for joining us.
Appreciate your time today. If you have any more questions, you should be able to find contact information for myself and any of our speakers in the left-hand side of your screen in the speaker bio section, and you'll be able to kind of connect with us on LinkedIn or email us either way. I can always help you get in touch with whoever you need to if you have any questions or need any more information. With all that said, again, thanks everyone for joining us, and have a great rest of your day, and we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody.
Bye.
Bye.